Change is upon us and the election is further proof that the cognitive era is here.

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There are massive implications (and opportunities) for business and marketers willing to invest in machine intelligence. The best pollsters in the nation conducted thousands of conventional surveys and still significantly missed the outcome. Polling is only as good as the model created to predict. If the model is based on wrong assumptions, then you’ll consistently and reliably get the wrong answer.

I think this is analogous to marketing. If we’re creating for persona archetypes based on an incomplete understanding of people and their surrounding cultural context, we’ll never achieve relevance. Cognitive systems provide deeper insights at far greater scale than traditional human analysis.

Would there be such shell shock in the country this week had we recognized the validity of the man+machine predicted outcome? Havas Cognitive’s EagleAi artificial learning intelligence tool for ITV news predicted that Trump would prevail.

The system was taught to understand sentiment, tone, and emotion and use it to predict voter behavior. EagleAi is just one real-world example about how we need to scale up our understanding of human behavior. Now more than ever, its time to ditch marketing stereotypes in favor of deep minds and develop a richer, more meaningful understanding of people–the beliefs, values, needs and desires of the citizens of America.

We believe smarter customer centric brands will see this as a justification to lean harder into cognitive to drive customer intelligence and deeper data insights at scale, driving automated, and more empathetic and personalized experiences.